Sermon:
November 28, 1999

Scripture:
Isaiah 40:1-11

There are those who put hope in the same category as daydreams. Hope, they say, is what people who buy lottery tickets do; hope is what the junior high student engages in when he or she develops a crush on the teacher; hope is what the student who hasn't studied does going into an exam; hope is what you do when you see the flashing red light behind you and hear the brief tone from the siren. Hope is what Charlie Brown does when he lets Lucy hold the football for him again. The editors of my old ENCYCLOPEDIA AMERICANA evidently agree that hope does not amount to much. That esteemed reference book has only refers to "hope" two times - once as some guy named "Sir Anthony" and once to a small town in Arkansas!

And yet, there is no more universal human emotion than hope. Admittedly, hope often seems a fragile thing; and yet without hope we are something less than human; and cynics notwithstanding, you will find the tributes to hope coming from every field of human knowledge. The psychiatrist A.H. Maslow calls hope "an underlying philosophy of values." The philosopher Huston Smith says that hope is one of the basic structures of an adequate life; even the agnostic philosopher Marcel said that "hope is perhaps the very stuff of which our soul is made."

But perhaps the poets say it best. Emily Dickinson called hope, "... the thing with feathers -That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all -"

One of the most stirring pictures of hope that I have come across was a poet's word picture of a flooded farm. I have since lost the poem, but I remember the imagery. The poet pictured the top of a plow handle and part of a fence row sticking above the water. In the background, the farm buildings were being claimed by the rising river. In the foreground of the scene, his face twisted with grief, the farmer poles a little skiff across the remains of his garden. At his feet, in the bottom of his small craft, there is a rake and a hoe, and on the highest and driest spot, near where the farmer stood with his pole, there was a packet labeled "seeds."

Beautiful images of the stubborn obstinacy of hope! And they come from every walk of life. Except, of course, my old ENCYCLOPEDIA AMERICANA.

Perhaps you have noticed how often hope shows up where logic would suggest that it ought not be at all, as though it is in the soil of despair that hope flourishes best. As Oliver Goldsmith wrote in "The Traveler,"

Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,

Adorns and cheers our way;

And still, as darker grows the night,

Emits a brighter ray.

That is the setting for our Scripture lesson of this morning. This part of the Book that we call Isaiah was written some 700 years before the birth of Christ. Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonians; the Holy City was in ashes, the mighty walls were broken down, the beautiful temple was in ruins; and the survivors of the battles had been taken to Babylon in chains, where they struggled to understand how they could worship away from Jerusalem. The Psalmist describes their despair in the 137th Psalm: "By the rivers of Babylon we sat down; we hung our harps on the willows and we wept while our captors mocked us, saying, `Sing us one of the songs of Zion!'" And as they wept, they asked, "How can we sing the songs of Zion in a strange land?" They could read their law books, they could tell the stories of the ancestors, but that only added to their pain, for this was the age of the centrality of the temple. What about their sacrifices? How could the cleanse themselves from sin without the temple? How could they worship in Babylon?

We may have difficulty feeling the depth of their anguish. If this building were vaporized tomorrow, while we would grieve, we would know that God is not dependent on a building. Ah, but you see, we would know that because the people of Israel learned this lesson in the Exile, learned to have hope in the midst of hurt.

"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people!" Handel set those words to music, and for some people they may be better known from Handel than from Scripture, but the words called forth the music; the words called forth that marvelous music, not the other way around, words from this obscure prophet whose name we are not even sure we know. We have called him "Isaiah" because he follows in the tradition of the Prophet of that name who wrote the first 40 chapters of the book years earlier, foretelling the fall of Jerusalem. But it was in the depth of the Exile itself that hope was born. Christian people came to see these words as a prophecy that was fulfilled again on a night outside of Bethlehem when a savior was born; but these words were cherished first by a hurting and heart sick people by the rivers of Babylon.

Hope still thrives in barren soil like that. I think some of you know Brian Bauknight. Brian is pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. I believe Brian has preached here. His father was once business manager of this church. In one of his sermons, he reported a conversation with a minister in his conference who had just returned from Bosnia. The pastor told him that everywhere she traveled in her visit she saw cardboard boxes bearing the Cross and Flame, the official emblem of the United Methodist Church. In bombed cities, she saw buildings with only two walls standing and on one of the walls, there was the Cross and Flame. This told people that this was where they could receive emergency supplies. The people doing the distributing wore flack jackets with a Cross and Flame on them. They were workers from UMCOR, the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

One of the very important items they were distributing, she said, was blankets. Blankets were desperately needed because of the cold in bomb-damaged homes and the disruption of fuel supplies. But when the people unfolded their blanket, they found something else as well. Tucked inside the folded blanket was a box of crayons, a children's coloring book, a bar of soap and a small vial of perfume. UMCOR was providing more than physical essentials - they were also providing hope, hope that things might someday be as they were before.

If you want an illustration of the power of hope, stand on the side of the Mount of Olives, facing the walled city of old Jerusalem - or look at a picture taken from there. If you look closely, you will see that the hillside below the wall has been turned into a huge cemetery. In fact, there are three cemeteries between you and the wall of the old city: a Jewish cemetery on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, a Christian cemetery in the valley itself, and a Moslem cemetery right up against the wall. Tragically, this is probably one of the few places in the Holy Land that so many of those three groups have been together for very many years without fighting. And, ironically, if the stories of their faiths are true, they will have to face their maker standing together, for this is called the Valley of Gehenna, the Valley of Judgment.

But I am digressing. The wall at which you are looking is the eastern wall, and you will see a double arched gate - but it is a gate only in outline, for it is filled in with stone. That outlined gate remembers the ancient gate of Jesus' day, which now lies buried in rubble a few feet beneath that double arch. In Jesus' day, there were great doors that swung open to let the light of the rising sun stream into the doors of the Temple. This ancient gate was the one through which Jesus and the Disciples entered the city on Palm Sunday; now there is only the outline in cold, unmoving stone.

What does a walled up gate have to do with hope? Well, you see, when the Turks conquered Jerusalem and rebuilt the wall, tradition said that they would occupy the city only until Messiah came. And when he came, he was to enter the city through this Golden Gate. Christians feel that already happened on Palm Sunday, of course, but the Orthodox Jew was - and is still - looking for Messiah to come. So the Turks not only walled up the gate so no one could enter by it, they placed their cemetery in front of it because a devout Jew would not walk through a graveyard on his way to the Temple! So you see, that cemetery and that walled up gate are tributes to hope. The conquerors knew that hope is not the weakling that some imagine it to be. They feared such hope so much that they did all they could to discourage it.

But walls and bodies will not put down hope. Two years ago, James Wall wrote in the Christian Century about a film that documents some of the events leading to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the turn from Communism to freedom in East Germany. The movie re-creates events at Leipzig's St. Nicholas Lutheran church, during the peaceful revolution of 1989.

The demonstrations began as prayer meetings across the city, even though many who came were not committed Christians. Lack of freedom to travel, the economy, pollution, the threat of nuclear war were all conditions feeding the unrest. On the night of October 8, 1989, more than 70,000 citizens gathered in the streets of Leipzig. The St. Nicholas pastor urged the demonstrators to be nonviolent. Meanwhile, security officials waited to hear from Moscow and Berlin on using force to subdue the demonstrators. Those orders never came, and the police gave up. A month later, on November 9, the Berlin Wall fell.

In the film, the chief of security, who had wanted to subdue the demonstration, is shown staring out over the crowd in front of his headquarters. "We planned everything," he says. "We were prepared for everything - everything, except for candles and prayer vigils." (an editorial by James Wall, Christian Century, March 13, 1996, p.283)

But that night in Leipzig was not really about candlelight and prayers. That victory belonged to hope. Candlelight and prayers just happened to be what Hope was wearing that night.

Hope. We could all use another helping of it. To be sure, we have our islands of peace and tranquillity. Three days ago, many of us were probably giving at least passing thoughts to the many blessings that we enjoy compared to so much of the world. But given the wars and famines and personal tragedies that plague our world we, too, have need of hope.

And so the Advent Season comes again and asks us to prepare to remember again that Christmas is really another name for Hope. Have you ever noticed how many of the carols mention the word? Notice when we sing them in the next few Sundays. "O Little Town of Bethlehem" reminds us that "the hopes and fears of all the years, are met in thee tonight." In "O Holy Night," we will sing about "A thrill of hope! The weary world rejoices!" "Angels from the Realms of Glory" has a line about "saints before the altar bending, watching long in hope and fear." And there is a Spanish carol in which we find the words, "When all seemed lost in night, came the sun whose golden light brings unending joy - of our hope's bright dawning."

I know that there are those for whom the Christmas season is a season of deeper depression, perhaps because the surface glitter of the season seems so false, perhaps because they remember Christmases past when they were not alone. But if your life seems empty and barren, let me plead with you - do not abandon hope. For hope is what will bring you through. The outcome of that hope may not be exactly what you envisioned, just as the Prophet's vision of the end of the age did not happen the way he thought it would; but deliverance will come and hope will triumph in the end.

At Stetson University's Winter Pastor's School a couple of years ago, one of our speakers told of a pastor who went to a nursing home to hold a worship service. They didn't have a chapel, so they set up chairs in the dining room. Someone had donated a piano and someone usually went along with him to play a couple of hymns in case none of the residents who were able to do that.

As the time for the service approached and people were coming into the room and taking their seats, one of the nurses came in pushing a wheelchair. The woman in the chair had evidently always been a small person, but now she was so shriveled and drawn and her body so twisted with arthritis that she could not have stayed in the chair without the soft cloths that had been used to tie her there and keep her from falling out. She was not sleeping, but her head was bowed over onto her chest. She apparently could not lift it up very far. The nurse parked the chair off to one side of the room and came over to the pastor.

The nurse told the pastor that the lady was 105 or 106 years old - no one seemed to know for certain. She said that the woman didn't know, and they didn't either, since she had outlived all her family. Then the nurse added, "She really doesn't know what is going on anymore, but she seems to like to be here for the services so we always bring her; but she won't bother you."

The pastor said he was sure that it would not be a problem. Before the nurse could walk away, the woman seemed to rouse herself a bit; he saw her try to lift her to look towards him. She lifted one hand from the arm of the chair, as much as the safety cloth would permit, and beckoned to him. The nurse saw the movement and saw the pastor start towards her and said to him, "You don't need to do that. She really isn't coherent."

But the pastor went over anyway. When he reached the chair, the woman crooked a finger at him as though to ask him to bend closer. So he did, putting his ear down close to her lips; and this is what he heard: (If I was gifted in the way Bill Ritter is, I would sing it to you. But I am not, so I won't. But, then, that lady was not much of a singer either, or at least not any longer.) But what the pastor heard didn't need a great voice to convey its message. What he heard was a feeble voice singing, "O Jesus, I have promised..."

Do you know that hymn? Do you know the words that come next? "... to serve Thee to the end." Do you remember the last line? The one that says, "And Jesus, thou hast promised to all who follow thee, that where thou art in glory, there shall my spirit be .. O give me grace to follow, my Master and my Friend."

That ancient lady may not always have know what was going on and she may not have been too coherent at times, but she had hidden hope in her heart and while she was bound to a wheelchair, she still traveled the highway of hope.

For "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. And the crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough places plain; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed .. for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it."

This is the word of the Lord. Hide it in your heart! And take hope!